Tears for Trees

My family sold a property in the Napa wildland interface in 2019 and it felt like we got lucky. After forty years and two generations on the ridgetop, we were land rich and cash poor, and after the 2017 firestorm all around us it was clear it would take heaps of money to weather the future in this at-risk corner of the wine country. 

Since we stayed on in one house as renters, however, I’ve been able to observe first-hand the army of white trucks topped with cranes and chippers deployed to remove the oaks, redwoods, bays and manzanitas from around the power lines on our mountain. The main access road to the big asset at the end — the Christian Brothers monastery and the Hess-Persson winery — got a lot of attention from this steamrolling vegetation management machine. The proximity of that asset probably saved our little property in 2017. Clearing and fire proofing on a landscape scale after that could save it in the future. Regardless, it’s still heartbreaking to see 200-hundred-year-old oaks in heaps and lopsided redwoods — limbless on one side, fully branched on the other, like a wire brush.

I asked PG&E for some numbers on what they’ve been up to in what they call “High Fire-Threat Districts” across Napa County. According to their North Bay spokesperson Deanna Contreras, PG&E spent approximately $1.06 billion dollars in 2019 and $1.4 billion in 2020 on vegetation management programs along transmission and distribution lines across Central and Northern California, which included routine and compliance work, work to mitigate trees impacted by the drought and bark beetle infestation, and work in high fire-threat areas. They have also granted nearly $17 million to local Fire Safe Councils since 2014, including the Napa Firewise Foundation.

Of course, I know that this great tree slaughter is all in the interests of public safety and fire safety, and that our human development of these landscapes has prevented historic natural fire in ways that could have prevented the current culling. And I also know that when power lines blow down on a red flag day, the results can be deadly and costly, and that nonetheless people resent the public safety power shutoffs.